


All Our Precious Things

by Coraniaid



Category: Mass Effect - All Media Types, Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, Cross-Posted on FanFiction.Net, Gen, Quarians
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-12
Updated: 2020-12-11
Packaged: 2021-03-01 22:54:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 6
Words: 21,335
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23614822
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Coraniaid/pseuds/Coraniaid
Summary: What Tali'Zorah learned on her Pilgrimage.Canon-compliant, primarily following the events of the first game. Focus is on smaller moments and Tali's interactions with the rest of the crew.
Relationships: Female Shepard & Tali'Zorah nar Rayya, Garrus Vakarian & Tali'Zorah nar Rayya, Liara T'soni & Tali'Zora nar Rayya, Urdnot Wrex & Tali'Zorah nar Rayya
Comments: 1
Kudos: 18





	1. A Promise

It's been centuries now. Centuries since we were forced to leave our home. Since we were driven out into exile in a hostile galaxy. Abandoned by our allies; forgotten by those who once professed to be our friends.

Our enemy parades through the streets of our ruined cities while their orbiting ships darken our skies. Our home was a garden world: not a paradise which we stumbled into by chance, but something green and vibrant that we crafted with our own hands out of the very desert. But only weeds grow now in the gardens cultivated by our ancestors. No flowers are left to mark their graves.

And we, the children of those who were left to die by the Council? We are forced to scavenge and barter for scraps in order to survive. When we send our children out on their pilgrimages, they find themselves in a galaxy where - for all our people's intelligence, for all our culture and history - they are seen as little better than vorcha. Parasites, they call us. Vermin. Thieves or beggars. Creatures beneath contempt, fit only for servitude or ridicule..

And why? Because we brought our destruction on ourselves, by pursuing technological advances beyond those permitted by the Council?

But the salarians unleashed the rachni and the krogan on the galaxy. In their arrogance, their scientists brought about the deaths of billions. The turians fought wars against their own colonies, turning armies and fleets and weapons of mass destruction on even their own people. Surely they have broken more taboos, killed more people, than any quarian? And yet the turians and the salarians sit proudly on the Council, while the quarians are pariahs.

The galaxy would rather, I think, that we had not survived. That would be neater. Better that we were nothing but a tragic tale of hubris; nothing but a story told to scare children. Better that we be remembered only as victims, for a while, and then forgotten. Lost to the dust.

But we have survived. With nobody to rely on but ourselves, and nothing to trust but our own determination and ingenuity. We will not let the galaxy forget us. And we have not forgotten.

More than four hundred years have passed since the last quarian fled in terror from the devastation and destruction of the geth. As the old calendars of our home world measure it, almost eighty thousand days. Almost eighty thousand suns have risen now on a Rannoch on which no quarian draws breath; eighty thousand bright sunrises which have warmed no faces and brought hope to no lives.

There are those among us who whisper, still, that we should take the easy way out. Disband the Fleet; accept permanent exile. Settle on some other world; whatever scraps are left after the turians and batarians and volus and humans and asari have secured the colonies they wish. Forget the dream of Rannoch, the world from which we came.

Find somewhere else.

But a world is more than just a planet. A world is a home: it is part of a people's identity. Our bodies did not evolve to live on worlds other than our own; our lungs were not meant to breath alien air. From Rannoch our people came and to Rannoch we will - we must - one day return.

There is a reason that those who advocate resettlement speak only in whispers. They feel ashamed. And they are right to feel this way, for what they call on us to do is shameful. To give up on Rannoch now, after all these years of exile, would be the final betrayal of everything our people have struggled for since the days of the war. No true quarian could ever do such a thing.

We will never, ever surrender to the machines. We will fight them, just as our parents did, and their parents and their grandparents before them. We will fight with every weapon we can salvage, every ship we can repair. Whatever it takes, we will fight. And one day we will defeat them. One day we will retake what is rightfully ours.

Two days ago I promised my daughter that she would live to one day walk in peace on the surface of Rannoch. A Rannoch free of the geth, restored to its rightful place as the capital and cradle of the quarian people. I told her that I would build a house for her there: a place where she could raise children of her own, and entertain them with stories of our victory over the enemy.

I intend to keep that promise. Not just for my daughter, but for all our daughters. For all our children.

Whatever it takes.

Keelah se'lai.

\- Admiral Rael'Zorah, Day 76,831 of Exile, personal logs


	2. Warriors

Day 78,401 of Exile / the _Neema /_ Han'Gerel

He still isn't sure what to make of Rael'Zorah's daughter.

Ever since she returned from her Pilgrimage she's been different. In a sense that's true of all returning pilgrims, of course. Nobody comes back quite the same person as when they left. This is one of the reasons for the Pilgrimage itself: not just a chance for the young to prove themselves, but an opportunity to learn from what the rest of the galaxy has to teach them.

But something about this change feels different to what he had expected. More fundamental. He understood Rael's daughter, before she left. A bright child, he thought. Studious, diligent, quiet. Talented with electronics, but unsure of herself. Unsure if she was ready to deal with the pressure of being Admiral Rael'Zorah's only daughter.

He isn't sure how much of that's true, anymore. She still seems troubled, as if something heavy weighs upon her mind, but he senses that the source of her trouble has changed. She worries about the human crew she served with on her Pilgrimage; pays less attention to political manoeuvering and factions on the Fleet that she should. She seems haunted, he thinks. As if she's seen too much.

Her Pilgrimage had certainly been more violent than her father had wished. She'd left talking of studying with the asari on Illium; learning about currency trading or diplomatic initiatives. She needed something that would challenge her, her father had thought. Needed to learn something new, some new skill that could help her to better help the Fleet.

Instead she'd spent months traversing the galaxy with a Council Spectre, fighting pirates and slavers. She'd witnessed chaos and destruction across the Traverse, seen colonies fail, almost been killed several times. That sort of experience would change anyone, he thinks. Let alone a child. And not necessarily for the better.

And of course she was present at the Battle of the Citadel. She fought geth troops on the Presidium itself. The only quarian to do so, except for a few unlucky non-combatants who were visiting the station when the enemy had first attacked.

The thought still makes him angry, even now. Who knows more about fighting geth than the quarians?

He had hoped, when the human colonies were first attacked, that the galaxy would finally unite against their common enemy. Quarian expertise, allied with asari and salarian resources and human and turian military strength, would unquestionably have been enough to bring the fight directly to the geth. The whole military campaign in the Traverse could have been over in days, well before the geth launched their strike on the heart of Council space. With the geth threat to human colonies neutralised, they could have pressed on through the Veil, liberating Rannoch and ending the synthetic threat once and for all.

But none of that had happened. He'd been a fool to hope otherwise, he realised. Rael and Daro'Xan had both warned him as much at the start.

The Council never learned from their mistakes; never acted when they could delay. Small wonder that, if it wasn't for the humans, the Council would all be dead.

He's heard the rumours of course: Rumours that there was more to this geth attack than the Council admits. That the geth were not just working with a rogue Spectre, but with something far more dangerous: an ancient machine intelligence, one which they worshipped as a god. Something that had brought down the Protheans, the long-vanished people who had first built the mass relays. Something that lurked even now at the fringes of dark space.

It seems unlikely to him, to say the least. The sort of wild conspiracy theory that always flourishes in times of crisis; a face-saving excuse for the humans and the turians to explain away their initial defeats. Of course the geth alone could not have been at fault; not if any species other than the quarians have been humbled. Better to trust in children's stories than admit that the geth alone are nightmare enough.

He hopes that Tali'Zorah won't allow herself to be used by those who have spread these stories for their own political ends. Hopes that she hasn't been spreading them herself, against the instructions of the Admirals.

Still, for all of Han's worries, he knows the girl is a fighter. Just like her father.

And he can't deny that her Pilgrimage gift was a good one; a gift worthy of her father's child. With the right guidance, she will be an asset to any ship in the Fleet.

He is pleased that she has chosen to join the crew of the _Neema_. War is coming, coming sooner than almost anybody expects. Rael has warned him. Having crossed the Veil once, the geth will not stay idle long. And even if the Council continue to ignore them, conflict between the humans and the geth means that for the first time in generations the quarians can dare to dream of striking back against their old oppressors.

Rannoch is waiting for her children to come home. If the geth can be defeated, this might happen sooner than almost any of them had dared to dream. Today the galaxy stands on a precipice, just as it did centuries ago when the geth first rebelled,

The Admiralty Board will be sure that, this time, the quarians are ready.

* * *

Day 78,139 of Exile / the _Normandy_ / Tali'Zorah

Urdnot Wrex is the first krogan Tali's ever met.

Not quite the first krogan she's ever seen, mind you. She was only on the Citadel for a few days, but she spent enough time in the Wards to notice the krogan bouncers lurking in the background of every club; the krogan mercenaries loitering in twos and threes outside the weapon shops. That was different though. Those krogan were strangers, at best; mere scenery at worst. Wrex is something more than that: somebody who she sees every day, somebody with whom she shares a ship and a commanding officer. Somebody who she might need to rely on to stay alive. A crewmate.

She still isn't used to the idea of non-quarian crewmates.

He scares her, at first, more than she'd like to admit. She doesn't venture far from the engine room for the first few days after they leave the Citadel. Adams and the rest of the engineering team have been nothing but welcoming to her; and other than eating and sleeping she really hasn't had much to do except study the ship's strange propulsion system.

But she can't spend all her time lurking in engineering. Not if she wants to be useful. Saren and his geth are a threat to the whole galaxy, and she's going to help Shepard stop them.

And if she's brave enough to do that, she reasons, she must be brave enough to talk to people on her ship about subjects other than mass effect drives and cooling system maintenance.

She's working up the courage to go out into the hanger and strike up a conversation with Vakarian about the ship's limited range of dextro-rations when she hears raised voices. Wrex's voice, in particular.

"Go ask the quarian if you want stories." he spits.

She didn't mean to eavesdrop, but even on a human ship there's only so much room. They can all hear Wrex, voice increasingly loud, as he angrily denounces the Council, the turians and his own people. It's the longest speech she's heard from him since they met.

"Easy, Wrex," the human says. "I was just making conversation. Didn't mean to upset you."

"Your ignorance doesn't upset me, Shepard," Wrex rumbles in reply. But at least the argument seems to be over.

She still has no idea what they were arguing about. She likes Shepard, she thinks. And not just because the Commander probably saved her life back on the Citadel. Humans really aren't what she'd expected them to be.

She puts off going out for a few more hours after that. Helps Adams run some basic diagnostic checks on the Tantalus drive core.

The _Normandy_ is an impressive ship - smaller than the _Rayya_ , or many of the other Fleet vessels, but decades more sophisticated. She'd had no idea that humans were so technologically advanced. On the Fleet, the consensus was that the humans were primitive upstarts; barbarians who had barely managed to master space flight.

She wonders what else that she was taught on the Fleet was wrong.

Finally, she decides that she has to go and face the ship outside engineering; angry krogan or not. She still has some modifications to make on her shotgun. Safer to do that away from the ship's experimental drive core.

The docking bay seems empty without the presence of the Mako. Shepard's taken it, along with Williams and Vakarian. Out on a mission planetside somewhere; looking for Matriarch Benezia's missing daughter. She's not entirely sorry. In her own way, she thinks Williams is almost as frightening as Wrex. She doesn't think the marine likes her much, either.

The mercenary is deceptively quiet for somebody so large. Or maybe she's just more distracted than she realised, once she gets started on those modifications. He's crossed half the distance to her before she realises he's moved.

"You even know how to use that thing?" His expression is still hard for her to read - reading facial expressions at all, staring at a stranger's bare face, is still so new for her - but he sounds sceptical.

"It's just a tool,", she says, trying and failing to emulate the way her father speaks when he's conferring with the other admirals. "A machine. What sort of quarian would I be if I didn't understand machines?"

Her Aunt Shala taught her to how to use this gun, she thinks. It's an old model Hurricane: practically an antique at this point. Shala'Raan had bought it when she was a Pilgrim herself, she'd said. Back on Palaven in the days when Elanus Risk Control were still an all-turian private company.

Wrex isn't impressed.

"Didn't ask if you could build one," he snorts. "Asked if you could use it. You ever fired that gun in anger? Every shot somebody with it?"

"Yes," she says. Snaps, really - she hadn't meant to raise her voice.

"They get up again?" the krogan asks.

"No." she says, more quietly this time.

It's only been a few days since the fight in the Wards. Only been a few days since … since she killed somebody.

"Good." Wrex says, a hint of approval in his voice.

She works in silence for the next few minutes, pulling out old parts, reviewing what's left and making plans for what else can be replaced. Despite all the strangeness of her surroundings and her new crew, at least this is something that feels familiar.

"You quarians messed up the whole galaxy when you let the geth break free. Do your people ever talk about it?"

Tali blinks; grateful for her helmet for hiding her reaction. Of all the questions to ask, why would - oh. Is he testing her? She'd hoped, when she left the Fleet and her father's shadow, that there would be a little less of that.

"Do krogan size everyone up for a fight?" she asks, warily. She can't understand why else he'd be acting this way.

"Yes." The reply comes immediately, almost without thought.

Wrex seems surprised by the question. Surprised, she notes, but not insulted.

"Well, I'm not going to fight you," she says. "On the Fleet, we work together or we die. There aren't many of my people left. That's why we have to cooperate."

Wrex only grunts in reply, She's reminded suddenly of how old he must be. Not just older than her grandparents would be, if any of them were still alive, but older than the geth. Older than the Exile. Did he ever meet any of the quarians, before then? Does he remember what they were like?

"It's the same on this mission," she says as firmly as possible, trying to ignore the sense of vertigo. "This ship, this crew: we're all the Council are offering to stop Saren. We have to work together if we want a chance."

She's just about finished with her upgrades.

"And I'm not 'the quarian'", she adds, picking up the shotgun and trying her best not to clutch hold of it defensively. "My name is Tali."

She glances up at the krogan, to see how he responds. He tilts his head slightly, looming over her. They lock eyes and he just stares at her, considering. She finds it hard not to hold her breath.

"Tali," he says, finally, face still unreadable. She hopes that she passed.

"So long, Wrex." she says, turning back to engineering.

Her suit's in-built biometric display flashes up on the periphery of her vision. Her heart rate and adrenaline are up, but both still in safe levels. She feels like she's making progress. One step closer to being an asset to the crew, rather than a burden.

If she's lucky, maybe she'll even get to go on the next mission.

* * *

Day 78,167 of Exile / Edolus / Tali'Zorah

No living thing should be that big. It's impossible, she thinks to herself. Even in the low gravity of this desert world, the square-cube law alone would surely rule it out. How can it possibly find enough food to survive on this arid world? Where does it get the energy to move?

And yet it exists, and it is angry. Its roar echoes across the desert sands as it chases after them. Shepard spins the Mako in a widening circle, trying to get some distance between them and the creature. A thresher maw, Wrex had called it.

It had burst from the ground just when they reached their destination; just seconds before they'd been about to disembark. Another few minutes, and they'd have be completely helpless. If it had had the cunning to wait …

But it's just an animal. She tells herself that repeatedly, until she almost believes it. It's just an animal, and they've all survived worse.

She's just about got control of her breathing now. Her enviro-suit's heads-up display has stopped flashing up warning messages about her pulse and heart rate. They're going to handle this.

Then the Mako hits something half-buried under the sand and almost flips over. Tali crashes into the side of the vehicle and Wrex curses as the power briefly flickers off and on and off again. Shepard struggles with the engines but to no avail. They're stuck, motionless. Helpless.

And the roar of the worm pursuing them, getting closer.

"Get this thing moving, Tali," Shepard urges, grabbing a pistol and fastening her helmet. "Wrex and I will buy you some time."

She's seen Shepard and Wrex fight before: on the Citadel, when they first met, and then later when they fought together against smugglers and pirates.

There are quarian biotics, but they're very rare. Quarians on the fleet don't get exposed to eezo except when things go tragically wrong. And even when a quarian is born with the potential it is unlikely that their parents will subject them to the difficult surgery needed to install a neural implant. So seeing the human and the krogan fight is like nothing she'd ever imagined witnessing before; like something that belongs in a story rather than reality.

Strong biotics can hurl their enemies through the air with a thought; block weapons fire with a gesture; rip and tear apart armour from the other side of a battlefield. And the krogan and the human are both strong, she thinks: at least if she's any judge.

But they're hopelessly outmatched, even with their biotics. Their guns aren't powerful enough to hurt it; the mass effect fields they can manipulate too weak to slow it down for long. All they can do is play for time; distract the creature, annoy it. But sooner or later, it won't be enough. Sooner or later ...

She really doesn't want to die here.

Fixing the engines is easier than she'd feared it would be. The lights fade back in, and the life support restarts.

But the Mako is still stuck, wheels spinning uselessly against the dirt. There's nothing she can do to get it moving, not from inside. But the shields are still holding up, at least for now. And now that she's got the power running again, the main cannon should be working. The cannon...

She's never operated it herself before: that's always been Wrex's job, before, while Shepard drove and she focused on keeping the shields instact. And the controls are strange at first; unfamiliar and counter-intuitive. The engineers who designed this thing weren't quarian, that's for sure. But ultimately, it's a machine. And as she told Wrex days earlier, she knows how to use machines.

She forces herself to move, out from her usual station and up into the gun turrets. It's slow going at first - she has to be careful not to let her suit get damaged, ripped by a loose nail or protruding handhold. The Mako wasn't built for non-humans, and its interior is anything but sterile. But she hasn't got the time to be sick.

It feels like it takes her hours, but finally she's ready, eyes on the target and controls in her hands.

Her first shot goes wide. The whole vehicle rocks from the recoil. The cannon's mass effect generators accelerate a metal slug to an almost inconceivable speed; arcing faster than sight along a path that terminates in a shower of sparking metal fragments in the sand.

A few seconds later, her second shot actually hits; only a glancing blow but enough for the creature to notice. The worm turns in her direction and screams: its face is a terrifying visage of mandibles, fronds, teeth and bulging eyes. Its body coils up around it; pulsating segments towering impossibly tall above the horizon. It's like something out of a nightmare, an impossibility.

But she's got the range of the gun now, and her third shot hits the creature right between the eyes. It screams again - this time more in pain than in defiance - and then rapidly sinks beneath the ground once more, ichor and acid blood trailing in its wake. Perhaps it's not used to its food fighting back.

In the ensuing silence, she can hear her heart pounding in her chest, feel the air filters whirring in her suit. She almost doesn't hear the rest of her squad coming back to join her by the Mako.

"Nice shooting, Tali."

Shepard and Wrex have both fought these things before, she thinks. Neither of them had seemed all that surprised when the monster burst from under the desert sand. Shocked, yes; but both had recognised the thresher maw for what it was.

The mercenary grins at her now, a predator baring its teeth. It should be alarming, but in comparison to the thing they just fought a krogan seems almost normal now.

"First time facing a thresher maw?" he asks.

She doesn't trust herself to speak yet. She nods instead.

"Before the salarians came, we thought the maws were native to our world," the krogan says, idly reloading his shotgun with one hand. "But you'll find them all over the galaxy, if you go looking for them. Or if you don't."

He looks around at the ruins of the camp they've reached, eyes coming to rest on the Commander.

The people they came to rescue are dead; killed by the thresher maw whose nest they must have disturbed on arrival. The nest that somebody must have deliberately lured them into; just as they'd tried to lure the crew of the _Normandy_.

Shepard stares at the emergency distress beacon that brought them here without speaking for a long time. Tal thinks she's going to attack it, at first: knock it to the ground, fling it away with a biotic field. Instead, Shepard quietly pulls open a panel at the side and flips off a switch. The lights on the beacon wink out and the machine falls silent.

The human takes a deep breath.

"Admiral Kahoku will want to know what happened here." she says. Her voice is flat, oddly affectless. Whatever emotional response she had to seeing the thresher maw, she's clearly trying hard to suppress it. "I'll have Pressley send down a team to collect the bodies. They deserve-"

Her voice wavers, for a moment, and she has to visibly fight to regain control. At her side, almost ignored, one hand clenches into a fist.

"They deserved better than this," she says.

She looks away from Tali and Wrex over the barren sands, whispering something to herself that Tali's translators don't pick up.

On the fleet, Tali had classes on the social values and customs of all the major Council races. General studies, when she was younger, then focused crash courses as she grew older, as preparation for her Pilgrimage. So she knows, for example, that most asari have abandoned the old Athame Doctrine for the newer siari pantheism. She knows that the hanar worship the Enkindlers, that the turians practice animism; that the batarians venerate the mythical heroes who first founded the castes of their civilization and that many salarians still honour the astrolatry and syncretism of their pre-space flight ancestors.

And she knows that the human's Alliance is avowedly secular; an after-effect of centuries of religious warfare only exacerbated by the discovery of Prothean ruins on the fringes of their star system. Individual belief is tolerated, at least officially, but there is no single dominant human religion and religious figures have little public presence, almost all of it restricted to their home planet.

She knows as well that it's easy to unconsciously project quarian biases onto alien actions; see parallels with the familiar that are simply not there. She knows that there could have been any number of explanations for what Shepard said to herself.

But it sounded like a prayer.


	3. Family

Day 76,991 of Exile / the _Rayya_ / Shala'Raan

She can tell the girl's been crying again. Secretly, in the dark, when she thinks nobody will notice. She's seen the signs enough times.

She doesn't need to ask why, of course. The child misses her mother. Shala misses her too. Everyone misses Antu'Zorah, or misses one of the other thousands of people who died when the plague ravaged the Fleet less than a year ago.

She wishes that Antu's daughter trusted her more; that she didn't think she had to pretend. After all, Shala was present at her birth - had even been chosen to place the infant in her environmental bubble She'd been sick for a week afterwards, even with all her preparation. But Antu meant a lot to her, and so does her daughter. They're almost family, she sometimes thinks. And the girl doesn't have much family left.

"Good morning, Tali," she says, lowering herself to a crouch so that their helmets are level. "How are you feeling today?"

"I'm fine, ma'am," Tali'Zorah say quickly, only the faintest hint of a quiver in her voice.

"I'm .. pleased to hear that," Shala replies cautiously. "But I hope you know that, if you're not doing so well, then you can talk to me about it? It's okay not to be fine, sometimes."

"Father says we have to be strong," Tali says, hesitantly.

Shala recognises something of Rael in his daughter's stance; a hint of his stubbornness in the way she hunches her shoulders.

"He says that - that crying won't help us to beat the geth. He says that, um. That there'll be time to mourn when the war is over."

Rael'Zorah can be a bit of an idiot sometimes, Shala thinks. An old friend, of course - even before he married Antu - and a dedicated protector of the Fleet for as long as she's known him. But an idiot all the same. A child needs more from her father than an admiral's speeches.

"How are you getting on with that project we were talking about earlier?" she asks, deciding to drop the subject. It's not her place to criticise Admiral Rael in front of his only child.

"Oh!" Tali says, "I meant to tell you, it's -"

She fiddles with the settings on her omni-tool for a second or two, then taps out a command and looks back up.

"You should have it on your omni-tool now," she says.

"You finished already?" Shala says. This project was supposed to have taken weeks.

Rael had told her - months ago, before the plague, before Antu died - that his daughter had a bit of a talent for engineering, but even for a gifted child this was an ambitious assignment. She'd hoped to give the girl something to focus her energies on, to give her the opportunity to hone her skills and learn a bit of the reality of reconnaissance drone upkeep and maintenance.

She certainly wasn't expecting her to have made any real progress on her own.

Shala hopes Tali's not been getting into bad habits. She's seen lots of promising young students around Tali's age realise that they're bright enough to do the bare minimum in half the time their friends and classmates need. Then - if they're lucky - they have to spend weeks or months learning that the minimum isn't good enough. Not when it comes to the survival of the Fleet.

But as she scans through the schematics and the code, she realises that the girl hasn't been cutting corners. Quite the opposite.

"Tali," she says "This is really impressive."

She has students - young adults almost twice Tali'Zorah's age, freshly back from their Pilgrimages - who would struggle to produce anything this good.

"Um. Thank you, ma'am," Tali says awkwardly. She seems surprised by the praise, Shala thinks, which is odd. What sort of standard is Rael holding her to if this hasn't impressed him?

"Didn't your father tell you how good this was?" she asks her.

"Father wouldn't look at it," Tali says softly. "He says it's not fair to expect special treatment when other people can't have an Admiral looking over their shoulder all the time."

"That's …" For once, Shala finds herself at a loss for words.

"Your father sits on the Admiralty Board, but that's not all he is," she manages. "Not everyone has an Admiral to help them, but everybody needs help from time to time."

Tali's quiet while she digests this.

"You know, I could be an Admiral myself someday," Shala says.

She isn't sure what makes her say it, other than the urge to break the awkward silence. It isn't very likely, in truth - she's no politician, that's for sure, and she can think of several other people who the board are more likely to pick than her, if they ever need to replenish their numbers - but it is at least a possibility.

"Oh." the girl takes a few seconds to digest that. "Will that mean you won't be able to look at my designs either, then?"

Shala starts revising her estimate of just how much of an idiot Rael'Zorah actually can be, and of how willing she should be to criticise him.

"No, Tali," she says as gently as possible. "I'll always have time for that."

The girl seems painfully grateful to hear it. Shala can only hope that in the months to come - once the immediate shock of losing his wife has passed - Rael will remember that he is a parent, as well as a leader. Otherwise she might have to have words with him.

"Now, it's going to take me a while to read through these properly," she says, gesturing at the designs on her omni-tool. "But as you're here, perhaps we can talk for a bit."

She smiles to herself behind her visor. Rael wouldn't want her repeating this story to his child, she thinks, but right now she's not concerned about what Rael would want.

"Did I ever tell you the story of what happened on your mother's Pilgrimage?" she asks.

* * *

Day 78,179 of Exile / the Citadel / Tali'Zorah

There's a statue of a krogan standing in the middle of the Presidium.

Nobody seems to be bothered by it. Nobody except her, anyway. The milling crowds of shoppers and tourists stroll past it without a care. Few of them even pause to look at it. It's just part of the background. Normal. As if the krogan never want to war with the Council. As if the turians never unleashed the genophage. As if the Council never makes mistakes, or abandons its allies.

She wonders what Wrex would have to say about it.

"Garrus," she says. "Why did the Council decide to build a statue of a krogan warrior in the middle of the Financial District?"

"Hmm? Oh. Keepers probably moved it some time after it was built," Garrus says absently. "They tend to do that. Used to drive Pallin crazy when they moved everything in his office around."

Pallin used to be his superior officer. Or that's what Tali thinks, anyway - they've still not really spoken much. She doesn't know much about turians, beyond what she's seen on the vids. And Garrus Vakarian is not quite what she expected.

She isn't sure if he misunderstood her question on purpose or not. She thinks, on balance, probably not.

She knows he'd rather be with Shepard's team visiting the embassies than wandering around the Citadel with her, but she wishes he was a bit more subtle about it.

"Is it strange to be back?" she'd asked him when they first docked. She can't imagine doing what the turian has done: severing ties with his family, leaving behind people who relied on him, to travel the galaxy helping an alien species who were at war with his own people not that long ago.

"Strange?" he'd repeated, thoughtfully. "I guess it is. I worked here for a long time. Or tried to, anyway."

"Do you regret leaving?" she'd asked him. "What we're doing is important, but …"

"Hunting down a rogue Spectre and his army of geth, with the fate of the whole galaxy at stake?" he'd interrupted. "I'd say that beats working in C-Sec."

He had seemed altogether too enthused by this, she'd thought.

"Well," she'd said - snapped, really - "I'm pleased that the imminent destruction of all organic life has improved your career opportunities."

That was a couple of hours ago. She reflects to herself that perhaps there's more than one explanation for his current reluctance to speak.

She wishes she were back on the _Normandy_. Being on the Citadel still doesn't feel safe. She'd felt so alone when she first arrived here: running for her life, without friends or allies. This is not a place where quarians are made to feel welcome, even at the best of times. And these are certainly not the best of times.

A couple of passers-by slow down as they walk past, falling silent until they think - wrongly, as it happens - that they're out of earshot. And the volus merchant on the other side of the hall has been staring at her intently ever since they arrived. As if she'd be interested in the second-rate rubbish he's selling, anyway. After so much time with the engineering crew on the _Normandy_ , she'd almost forgotten just how unwelcoming most aliens are.

She tries not to let it bother her. She knows that if the turian wasn't with her she'd be getting more trouble than dirty looks.

"Do you need a new shotgun, Tali?" Garrus asks idly. He doesn't seem to have noticed the audience she's drawing. Or perhaps he's chosen not to notice.

She doesn't need a new shotgun though. She shakes her head, and he goes back to scanning the prices that the hanar merchant is offering.

"It's a pity you can't wear any armour without a helmet," he said, in the same off-hand tone, as he haggles with the hanar about some upgrades for his sniper rifle.

Oh, yes, she thinks. My compromised immune system must be very inconvenient for you. How selfish of me. She knows that her reaction isn't fair; that she's probably reading more into the words than she should. So she stays quiet, and leaves the turian to get on with his business.

"Do you want to see any more of the Citadel?" he asks, after he's finally finished talking to the mechant.

She wants to say no, if she's being honest with herself. But this is her Pilgrimage, after all. When else is she going to have the chance?

"Any suggestions?" she asks him.

"Well, there's the Wards," he says, thoughtfully. "Or the Citadel Tower."

The last time she visited the Wards, Fist's thugs had tried to kill her. If Shepard and her crew hadn't turned up in time, they probably would have succeeded. She thinks she's seen enough of that place.

And though she thinks the top of the Citadel Tower is beautiful - more open green space than she's ever imagined, and breathtaking views across the open expanses of the Presidium - she knows that she'd stand out there even more than she does down here.

"Or we could look at the Relay Monument, I suppose," the turian offers when she says nothing.

That sounds … better. She nods, more eagerly than she feels. It's not much of a walk to the Monument from where they are. That means can persuade herself that the silence between them isn't too awkward.

The Relay Monument makes sense to Tali, in a way that the krogan statue didn't. It clearly belongs here, she thinks, shaped by the same hands that built the rest of the station.

There aren't any full-time artists on the Fleet. Quarians paint and dance and sing, of course - all organic life finds ways to express itself. But there's no room on the Fleet for idle hands and useless mouths. Art is a hobby, a pastime, not something to be done instead of vital ship maintenance or salvage work. There's certainly no place for sculpture: quite apart from the time, the Fleet can't spare the resources. Steel and iron are for fixing hull leaks; marble is nothing but ballast.

But if there were quarian sculptors, she thinks the Monument is the sort of thing that they'd build. In its way, she thinks, it's beautiful - just like the mass relays themselves. The Protheans hadn't had to make the mass relays aesthetically pleasing. They'd be the wonder of the galaxy even if they were hideous. But she thinks it says something about them that they did.

"So much empty space," she says wonderingly, almost to herself.

The turian isn't even looking at her. He's facing out over the lake - the impossibly wide, impossibly deep body of water that must cost more to maintain than half the ships in the Fleet - eyes on the embassy buildings in the distance.

"A thousand of my people could live here and never even see one another. I never thought I'd miss the crowds."

On the Fleet, a crowd of people means a crowd of relatives, or friends, or crew mates. People you could trust. Being part of a crowd, back home, meant you were safe.

Maybe it's because of the silence that she lets herself forget where she is, for a moment. Forget just who she's talking to.

"I'm not sure I ever really believed what my Father said about aliens until my Pilgrimage," she says sadly. "But the way people look at me here, I …"

She blinks, behind her helmet, and clears her throat.

"I never knew a crowd could feel so hostile," she says. "That so many strangers could hate me."

Garrus is paying more attention than she thought he was. Unfortunately.

"Well, your people did endanger the galaxy when you created the geth," he says reasonably. "It's surely not surprising if some people are angry."

She's glad the turian's not looking in her direction, she tells herself. It means he doesn't see her flinch.

* * *

Day 78,367 of Exile / Ilos / Tali'Zorah

A isolated geth isn't much smarter than an animal. That's part of why her ancestors thought they were safe. Most of the processes running on a single geth platform are devoted to tasks like walking staying upright. Processing sensory data or the precise control needed to hold a weapon or pick up an object. The sort of thing that most organics take for granted.

But two geth, in close proximity, can share processing power to a limited extent; they can't share sensory data or communicate directly, but working in parallel makes a lot of those basic tasks just a little bit easier. And with three geth, or four, or a dozen, it gets easier and easier still.

Records from the last days on Rannoch describe networks of thousands, sometimes tens of thousands of geth. When that many platforms networked together, the geth processes can think faster and deeper than almost any organic possibly can. Her ancestors had no chance against such an army.

The more geth you're fighting, the smarter they all are. The more geth you're fighting, the more likely you are to die.

So far they've fought through a small army of them.

This was a hunting pack, minutes ago. Around a dozen: hunters, snipers, juggernauts and a couple of the heavier armature units. They didn't have a chance. Now most of the units lie shattered on the ruined courtyard; broken chassis lying amid the weeds and rubble.

She's already half-raised her shotgun to finish it off when the geth's head suddenly explodes, shattered metal shrapnel flying across the ruins.

"Scoped and dropped!" crows a familiar turian voice in her ear. "That's sixty-two to me, Tali."

"No fair, Vakarian," she complains. "I did all the work for that one."

"Huh," says the turian thoughtfully. "Is it fair that you get the credit when you hack their systems and make them shoot each other?"

"It's not just fair, Vakarian," she says firmly. "It's hilarious."

"Then I guess that's sixty-two to me," he says smugly.

"And only seventy-five to me," she says sadly, "I must be losing my edge."

Vakarian splutters a bit in response, but she tunes him out. Focuses on checking that her shotgun still works and that her drone programs are working optimally.

Shepard listens to their bantering but doesn't comment on it. She doesn't speak much at all, these days, Tali reflects. She gives orders, and asks questions, but she's stopped joining in with the rest of them. Not the way she used to, with Williams and Alenko. She's stopped getting involved.

Shepard's really not been okay since Virmire, Tali thinks to herself. She hopes she finds somebody to talk to, if they make it out of here. When they make it out of here.

After the fight in the square they head down deeper into the abandoned building, Shepard silently leading the way. She's amazed that there's still power to operate the elevators. But the Protheans built to last, she thinks. The Citadel is proof of that.

Here, underground, it's harder to forget about the seriousness of what they're doing; the danger that they're up against. Even Garrus is affected. When they fight this time, they do so in near silence.

When the fighting is over, she sees the turian look around the ruined chamber uneasily. Until Saren and the geth arrived, this place must have waited undisturbed for thousands of years. There's a thick layer of dust on the floor, broken only by footprints and broken geth parts. Vakarian walks up to a wall covered in strange circuits and flickering hieroglyphics and shakes his head.

"There are secrets here that were meant to be forgotten," he says, almost to himself.

Liara will definitely want to visit this place once this is all over, she thinks. She's a little surprised Shepard didn't bring her along this time.

"Shepard," she says, "Did you-"

But the human has already wandered away, her attention drawn by a flashing terminal that looks strangely familiar. A touch of a button, and a blast of static resolves into pictures she can't make sense of, screaming noises that she can't comprehend.

Vakarian turns to her and they share a bemused look.

"This recording must be fifty thousand years old," says Tali. "No wonder we can't understand it."

"You ... can't understand it?" asks Shepard, sounding puzzled.

Tali supposes this must be another side-effect of the Cypher. Liara tried to explain it to her, once, but Tali's an engineer, not an expert in Prothean technology or asari mind-melding. But maybe this is the edge they need if they're going to be able to stop Saren.

"Can you make out anything useful?" asks Vakarian.

Shepard frowns and turns back to the screen.

The recording runs on: an incomprehensible babble of static and squawks. It doesn't even sound like language, to Tali's ears. There's no order that she can make out, no discernible pattern. Just chaos and noise. Even the translator programs built into her suit don't seem to have identified it as anything intelligible. But Shepard stares at it intently, poised at the console, leaning forward.

"... no," the Commander says eventually, shaking her head. "It's too badly damaged. We should go."

But she keeps staring at the terminal for a few seconds more, and Tali thinks she heard a faint tremor in her voice.

She wonders what it is that Shepard doesn't want them to hear.


	4. Survivors

Day 78,101 of Exile / the _Moreh_ / Zaal'Koris

Zaal has always thought of himself as a pragmatist. Somebody who believes in results, not theories. Somebody who cares about people more than ideas. Other species can afford to fight amongst themselves in favour of one belief system or another: they have the numbers to spare, after all. The quarians don't have that luxury. They have to do what they can to survive, using whatever methods they find that work, or they'll vanish from the galaxy.

But pragmatists are in short supply on the Admiralty Board these days.

That's why Zaal and his fellow admirals have just spent the last hour discussing a minor bit of graffiti. Rael'Zorah had brought it up at today's weekly meeting, just when Zaal had been hoping to wrap things up.

A routine maintenance patrol had picked it up last night: a terse message, seemingly burnt into the outer hull of one of the liveships. The patrol hadn't seen any sign of the culprits, and - although the area was meant to be covered by security cameras - there was no evidence on the vid recordings either, and no sign that they'd been tampered with.

The best guess at the moment seemed to be that the perpetrators had tampered with the last set of repairs, somehow: inserting a specially engineered steel plate that looked normal at first but which would reveal its hidden message after a certain amount of exposure to the vacuum. Clever enough, Zaal supposed, though it was a shame to see such ingenuity being wasted on trivialities like this.

It wasn't the technical aptitude of the vandals that had prompted Admiral Rael to bring it up, of course. It was the message itself. Just two simple words, in the ancient language of the homeworld: _Mered'vai Rannoch_.

Forget Rannoch.

Rael'Zorah had been incandescent, of course. Zaal hadn't bothered to point out that that was probably exactly the result whoever had placed the message had wanted. _Mered'vai Rannoch_ was the rallying call of the Nedas movement - young quarians calling for an end to Exile, for the resources of the Fleet to be spent on acquiring new permanent colonies, on planets more welcoming than geth-occupied Rannoch. And for all Rael's suggestions of sabotage, or implications of mutiny, there was no sign of any real damage to the ship or any evidence that damage had been intended. Whatever Rael might think, support for ending the Exile isn't a crime.

Zaal doesn't have much sympathy for the Nedas movement himself. He's a pragmatist, after all. Frankly he thinks their fanaticism is just another side of the same coin as Rael'Zorah's. Sometimes Rael talks about retaking Rannoch as if it's something he expects to see accomplished within months. Zaal finds that confidence misplaced. Unnerving.

The dream of retaking Rannoch is important, of course. He certainly wouldn't dispute that. It gives the Fleet a common purpose, something to unite around beyond mere survival.

But Zaal has no illusions that it's a dream he'll live to see it realised. That's not important. What's important is that the Fleet sticks together: there is safety in numbers, safety in being able to stay together and leave systems quickly when trouble draws close. No planetary settlement would be able to offer that, even if the Nedas movement were able to acquire rights to the sort of garden world they dream about.

No, he thinks: much better to stay together with the Fleet, and keep making slow and steady progress towards retaking Rannoch at some unspecified future point. He'd never admit it in public, of course, but he doesn't think that they'll be any closer to Rannoch a century from now.

Honestly, he doesn't think that that's important either.

Zaal's tired. He wants to go home. He doesn't like this ship: the _Moreh_ is a strange place: a former asari vessel repurposed by the Special Projects group, its proportions never seem quite right to him, its crew whisper and gossip amongst themselves in jargon he barely understands. He certainly doesn't like its captain. Sometimes he thinks that Daro'Xen cares more about understanding the geth than she does about understanding her fellow quarians.

No, he wouldn't spend any time here by choice. But he has a job to do. As the token representative of the Civilian Fleet on the Admiralty Board, he has to try to keep fighting.

It might have been easier if he wasn't perpetually in the minority, of course. Almost always fighting a losing battle against the allied forces of Rael'Zorah and Han'Gerrel and Daro'Xen. Some days the temptation to just give up is almost overwhelming.

But he can't. Somebody has to make a stand for what's right. To put the real needs of today's living, breathing quarians over fantasies of reclaiming Rannoch or of subverting the geth through some clever trick of programming or engineering. To make the case for pragmatism, however unpopular it might be.

On the bad days, he reminds himself that if firebrands like Rael'Zorah and Han'Gerrel were left to their own devices, the Fleet would most likely be at war with the Hierarchy already, over some perceived slight or other. He's managed to talk the Board down from anything like that, at least. They can mock him as a coward all they like, if that's what they need to do to justify seeing sense.

And the latest Admiral, the Patrol Fleet's Shala'Raan, has proven to be something of a surprising ally, these past few weeks. Zaal suspects Rael regrets casting the deciding vote to accept her nomination. He hopes he does, anyway: certainly Zaal regrets voting against her. Perhaps they'd both made the same assumptions about how an old friend of the family would come to cast their votes.

Of course, even with Admiral Raan's occasional dissent, Admiral Zorah still has a firm majority. Which means the Fleet's scare resources will still pour into Xen's Special Projects group, and plans for the forever war against the geth will always be prioritised over any attempt to chart a new course for the quarian people. Rael's latest crusade against the Nedas movement is only the latest in an ongoing campaign to label any doubters as traitors, to accuse anybody urging caution of cowardice.

Not that the Nedas movement has many supporters, of course. If anything, Rael's majority position on the Board underestimates how popular a figure he is across the Conclave and the wider Fleet. Sometimes things are posted on the extranet, of course, but people on the extranet can be found who'll agree with almost anything. Whatever Rael claims to believe, Zaal would be shocked if even a single member of the Conclave could be found who supported the Movement, even among the smaller ships of the Outriders' Coalition.

No, the fanaticism of the Nedas movement isn't the threat that keeps Zaal up at night. The fanatics he worries about are closer to home.

Privately, Zaal hopes that Rael'Zorah's daughter's Pilgrimage is less of a triumph than everybody seems to expect. Not that he has anything personal against the girl. He's never even met her. But the last thing the Fleet needs in these troubled times is more public acclaim for the Zorah clan.

Waiting in a strange ship for his shuttle to arrive gives him time to think. He wishes that it didn't: his thoughts these days tend to be darker than he'd like. He's getting old, he thinks. Losing faith in the idea that a better future is possible.

The galaxy has changed since his Pilgrimage, and not for the better.

With a new expansionist military power seizing control of worlds in the Traverse, it's becoming even harder for the Fleet to acquire the resources it needs to survive. The humans seem to be everywhere these days: stirring up trouble with the Hegemony, butting heads with the Hierarchy, starting trade wars with the volus. Taking by force the things that they want, while the Council stands by and does nothing to stop them.

At least the geth are still quiet. If the geth ever cross the Veil, then everything he's tried to do for the Fleet will come crashing down. Of course, from the way Rael'Zorah talks, it's only a question of when, not if, that happens.

Yes, these are dangerous times. Dangerous courses for the Fleet to navigate.

But his people are survivors. They survived the Geth War, they've survived centuries of Exile. And he thinks - he hopes - that they'll survive the leadership of Admirals Daro'Xen and Rael'Zorah.

He just isn't sure, sometimes, whether he will.

* * *

Day 78,203 of Exile / Feros / Tali'Zorah

She can't quite believe it's over.

Even now, she half-expects to turn a corner and see geth infiltration units bursting up from below the ground, or to descend some stairs and be surrounded by the creeping, moaning thralls of the Thorian. She's amazed at how quickly everything seems to have returned to normal. Or at least what passes for normal on Zhu's Hope.

Only hours ago, the geth had seemed to be everywhere. Lurking in the dark ruined tunnels beneath the colony, laying in ambush along the skyway, swarming like insects through the ExoGeni headquarters. She'd never seen so many of the machines working together before.

Shepard and Alenko had put up a brave front - they'd fought the geth together on Eden Prime, she'd reminded herself - but Tali had been close to panic.

These were the _geth_ \- the machines that had stolen her ancestors' home; killed so many of her people. As a child she'd grown up on stories about them; about the atrocities they'd committed, the threat that they represented. But they'd always stayed beyond the Veil. They'd always been a problem for the future, not something to be faced in the present. Suddenly they were here: crossed over the Veil and poised to take over the galaxy. Not just one or two isolated units, but what seemed like a whole army.

She couldn't quite believe that they had a chance. Not against so many.

But they'd won. Somehow. They'd fought until she could barely stand, pushing herself past what she'd thought were the limits of her endurance. And now the geth are gone - their war machines destroyed or fled - and the strange plant creature that had tried to take over the colony has been defeated.

And the colonists are alive.

That's the part that seems the most miraculous.

When Shepard had confronted the ExoGeni representative, when the same representative had decided to point his gun at her - at that point, Tali had dreaded what was coming. She'd thought they were heading for a massacre. When they'd made it back to the colony, and seen the Thorian-controlled colonists moving like machines among the plant monsters, she'd been almost sure of it.

And yet the colonists are alive.

Shepard had whispered her orders, as they'd crawled carefully down towards the Thorian's hidden lair. Stun grenades only. No lethal force. Even when the colonists were trying their best to kill them, they'd stuck to those rules. Even as their supply of gas grenades had started to dwindle, even when it seemed impossible to tell brainwashed humans from moaning thralls.

Now Tali is wandering peacefully through crowds of the very colonists who had tried so hard to kill them mere hours ago.

And the colonists themselves seem almost friendly. It's as though nobody's told them that they should be blaming her people for the geth. Which, she supposes, is almost literally true: cut off from the rest of the galaxy as they have been, she might be the first quarian these people have ever met.

She's not really sure what she's going to do with herself for the rest of the day.

After the Commander announced shore leave for the crew, Liara had dragged Shepard off to investigate the Prothean ruins underneath the colony. Wrex had invited himself along as well, once he heard the rumours of a pack of varren living in the ruins.

That made Tali the only alien above ground, other than the strange asari they'd rescued from the thorian. After a brief trip outside, Vakarian had muttered something about needing to work on the Mako and retreated back to the _Normandy_. There was still a small skeleton crew on board, including Adams and the XO.

It was certainly true that the Mako needed some work. They'd picked up plenty of damage on their journey to ExoGeni headquarters, not least when Shepard had decided to ram headfirst into a geth armature. But Tali hadn't missed the suspicious looks the colonists were giving him. And she didn't think he had either. The colonists might not have heard much about quarians, but Tali didn't think there were any humans in the galaxy who didn't have an opinion about the turians.

She'd have stayed in the ship herself, if Vakarian wasn't there. But Vakarian is there, and she doesn't want to speak to him right now. So she's just wandering around aimlessly, staring at the crude shelters amid the ruins and wondering how people can get used to living somewhere so remote, where the sky is so wide and empty.

"You know, the Commander grew up on a small colony like this."

Alenko is so quiet and self-effacing that she'd barely noticed he was there.

"Shepard grew up in a place like this?" she asks, curiously.

She really doesn't know much about the Commander, she thinks. The human has spoken to her several times now, between missions, but never reveals much about her past.

"Well, not exactly like this," Alenko says with a wry smile, gesturing in the direction of the strange Prothean architecture and the scattered remains of Thorian plant-matter yet to be cleared away. "But she was a colony kid, yeah. Grew up working a farm and everything, just like in the propaganda vids."

Living on a planet of your own - one you were born on, where you can grow real food - sounds wonderful. She can't imagine ever wanting to leave that, and says so. The human looks worried, then, as if he's afraid he's said the wrong thing.

"What happened?" she asks.

"Batarians," a low voice growls behinds them.

Chief Williams still frightens her a little bit, even after all these weeks aboard the ship.

"Batarian pirates hit the colony in 2170," the Lieutenant explains, acknowledging the other human's presence with a nod. "Overwhelmed the planetary defences. The colony was in the Traverse: far away from the bulk of the Alliance fleet. It took a long time for anybody to respond to their distress signals."

Tali shudders. She's never seen a batarian up close, but Auntie Raan used to tell stories which … well, she hopes they were exaggerated. There are reasons the Fleet never stays long in batarian space.

"Shepard made it out," Alenko says. "But her family weren't so lucky. She was sixteen. It must have been … well, I guess there's a reason she doesn't talk about it. Bad memories. But she signed up for the Alliance military soon after that."

"I didn't know." Tali says weakly.

She suddenly remembers talking to Shepard about her father. Well, talking at Shepard about her father, really. About how hard it was for her, growing up. About trying to live up to her people's expectation of her, as her father's only daughter. As if having a father people knew and respected was something to feel bitter about. If she'd known that Shepard's own parents were dead, she wouldn't have dared.

She can't imagine a galaxy without her father in it.

"Did you grow up on a colony yourself, Lieutenant?" asks Williams.

"Me?" Alenko seems surprised to be asked. "No, I grew up on Earth. My parents served with the Alliance, but I didn't even make it off-planet until I was recruited for Brain Camp."

The name doesn't seem to mean much to Williams. It certainly doesn't mean anything to Tali.

"Biotic acclimation and temperance training," he explains. Apparently that's clarification enough for the Chief. Tali decides she'll look it up later, if it's important.

"Anyway," he says, "What I was trying to say is that the Commander was never going to let anything happen to these colonists if she could help it. Protecting people like this: that's the whole reason Shepard joined the Alliance."

Tali notices Williams frown slightly, as if she's going to disagree. But she doesn't say anything. Perhaps Tali hasn't become as good at reading alien expressions as she thought.

"What's Earth like?" Tali asks, curiously.

"Well," Alenko says, thoughtfully. "It's crowded, I guess. Most humans still live on Earth. Only a few million of us have moved out to the colonies. That leaves about ten billion on Earth, give or take a billion."

There aren't even twenty million quarians in the whole galaxy. She can't imagine taking a population of billions for granted.

"I've never been to Earth," offers Williams. "My parents left a few years before I was born. Mom had relatives in South America, but they all seem to have emigrated over the last decade or so. Mom always used to say she was glad she didn't have to bring up kids on Earth."

Kaiden nods at that.

"Well, it's not as bad as it used to be," he says. "But yeah, things were pretty rough for a while, especially in the 21st century. In hindsight, we were lucky to find the Prothean ruins when we did."

The quarians had found their own Prothean ruins centuries ago, Tali reflects. Long before the geth, before the Exile. Were her ancestors as optimistic and confident about their future then as the humans seem to be now? Had they taken their homeworld for granted as much as the humans seemed to?

While she's thinking, the two humans exchange a glance that Tali has trouble interpreting.

"You think a lot of the Commander," Williams says. "You served with her long?"

"She's a good CO," Alenko says. He sounds a little defensive, Tali thinks. She's not sure why.

"She is," says Williams carefully. "Best CO I've had, for sure. But I'm just saying that-"

The Lieutenant shakes his head.

"Trust me, Chief," he says. "She always does the right thing."

Tali never does get around to looking up details on human biotic training.

* * *

Day 78, 347 / the _Normandy_ / Tali'Zorah

The _Normandy_ feels different now. Emptier, for all that they picked up a half-dozen new occupants when leaving Virmire. The crew talk more quietly, laugh less. Everyone seems just a little bit more on edge.

She supposes that that makes sense. After all, they've left somebody behind

Tali's alone in the engineering room right now. Adams is outside conferring with the salarians about something or other, and the rest of the crew are asleep, trusting her (and the ship's in-built VI) to alert them if they're needed. Tali's never needed as much sleep as the humans seem to though. And besides, she's having trouble sleeping tonight.

When the door to engineering slides open, she thinks it's Adams at first.

But it's not him. Somebody else has trouble sleeping.

Williams is still wearing the armour she wore when they lifted her off from Virmire. It's cracked and burnt in dozens of places. She looks terrible. Tali's surprised that the doctor let her out of the med-bay.

She thinks Williams has come looking for Adams, at first; that she'll leave when she sees he's not there. But she doesn't leave. The marine just stares into the drive core, watching the shimmering fields of dark energy spiral and reform as the ship burns through eezo. Tali wonders what she's seeing.

Williams clears her throat, still staring, unseeing, at the ship's core.

"I'm sorry, Kaiden," she said quietly. "Wherever you are, I hope you know that. I just ..."

She trails off.

"'in words, like weeds, I'll wrap me over: like coarsest clothes against the cold'," she says, as if reciting from memory. Tali doesn't know who she's speaking to. "'But that large grief which these enfold is given in outline and no more. That loss is common would not make my own less bitter, rather more. Too common. Never morning wore to evening but-'"

Williams takes a step back and seems to notice Tali's presence for the first time.

"Uh. That's from a poem," she says, suddenly awkward. "Tennyson. My Dad used to - well, it doesn't matter."

Everything is quiet except for the gentle hum of the engines. Neither of them speak. Tali doesn't think she'll ever get used to how quiet this ship can be.

"It should have been me," Williams says flatly, just when Tali thinks she's going to leave without speaking. "I told her …"

Tali isn't sure how to respond to that. She hadn't been there herself: she'd been on the ship with Joker and Adams. But she remembers staring at the screen in shock when the bomb went off. Even at the last, a part of her had thought Shepard would find someway to save them both.

"I'll miss him," Tali says sadly. It doesn't feel like enough, but she doesn't know what else she can say.

"Me too." says Williams, half turning to look back at the warp core. Another awkward silent minute passes before she speaks again.

"It just seems … overwhelming," the Chief says. "Like there's nothing we can do. Saren's working for some sort of ancient AI, messing with people's heads, planning to take over the galaxy. That ship, Sovereign. It talked about killing us all, wiping out galactic civilization like it was nothing. Like we were nothing."

She sounds angry now, a little bit more like the person Tali remembers from their first meeting.

"Fighting geth, fighting krogan," she continues, "All that made sense. How are we supposed to fight something like this?"

Tali just shakes her head. She'd seen Shepard's confrontation with the AI - with the Repear - through the screens as well. Ancient AI that the geth worship as gods? A part of her still doesn't want that to be true. Williams doesn't seem to need any more response.

"I almost killed Wrex yesterday," the human says. "He really got into it with the Commander. I thought he was going to try to attack her. And I wasn't going to let that happen."

She pauses, glances back over her shoulder in the direction of Wrex's usual spot. The krogan's not there at the moment, Tali knows: he's sleeping like the rest of them, wherever it is he's found to sleep. But Williams lowers her voice all the same.

"Don't get me wrong, I don't have a problem with Wrex. But if it came down to him or the Commander? I mean-"

She shakes her head, lets the sentence trail off unfinished. Tali almost understands, she thinks. Loyalty to the ship's Captain has to come first, after all. If a human visited the _Rayya_ and threatened the safety of its captain, she'd do whatever she had to do to stop them.

But to talk so casually after the fact about betraying a crewmate: somebody you've worked with, somebody you've lived on the same ship as - that's something she finds hard to understand. Maybe it's different for non-quarians, she thinks.

"But I remembered what Kaiden said, back on Ferros," Williams continues. "That Shepard always does the right thing. So I waited. And she did. That time."

"Well, I'm glad you didn't kill Wrex." says Tali, her voice sounding uncertain in her ears. She wonders why the Chief is telling her this. Maybe she's just the nearest person available who'll listen.

She'd been worried how Wrex would react on Virmire, of course. Everybody had picked up on it. Wrex didn't talk about his people much, most of the time, but she'd never believed his claim to have given up on them. How would she have reacted if Saren had been offering the prospect of reclaiming Rannoch from the geth?

But she wasn't surprised that Wrex had agreed to go along with the plan. He'd met Saren, after all. He knew the turian couldn't be trusted. And she thought he respected Shepard, too, though he'd never quite said it. He's not like the stories her people tell about the krogan.

"Have you ever lost anybody close to you before, Tali?" asked Williams abruptly. "I mean, if it's not too personal a question."

"My mother," Tali replies, after a moment's hesitation. "When I was much younger. She got sick, and -"

It sometimes feels like she's spent hours explaining to the rest of the crew why she needs to wear her suit. Trying to describe what the Exile has done to the quarians' already fragile immune systems, why she can't risk exposure to unknown pathogens or infections. Williams, she realises belatedly, has been one of the only humans she hasn't had that conversation with. One of the few who hadn't seemed to expect an explanation.

"Damn, that's awful, Tali." Williams says. "I'm sorry. "

She looks directly at Tali for the first time, meeting her eyes through her suit's faceplate.

"My dad passed away a few years ago," she offers. "I still miss him. Visit his grave, when I get the chance, but it's not …"

The human's voice trails off, and the ship falls silent until she clears her throat.

"Sometimes I'm reading a book or somebody tells me a tall story, and I think how much Dad will enjoy hearing about this. And that's when it hits me again. He's gone. He's really gone."

Williams shakes her head, runs a hand over her face. She seems surprised to notice that she's still wearing her armour.

"Anyway," she says, wearily. "I've taken up enough of your time. I should get back to … well."

Tali finds her voice before Williams makes it to the door.

"Chief," she says "I'll miss Kaiden but ... I'm glad you're alive."

It's only when she says it out loud that she realises that it's true.


	5. Visionaries

Day of 78,101 of Exile / the _Moreh_ / Daro'Xen

History will not be kind to Admiral Zaal'Koris. Certainly not if Daro'Xen has a say in the matter, which she rather thinks she will. Looking back on the Exile, future historians will be no kinder to her fellow admirals than they deserve. And look back on it they will: the Exile will not last forever. She knows that Zaal'Koris - and too many of the Fleet - have accepted the Exile as something that they will never be able to change. Something permanent; a penance that must be endured for the supposed crimes of their ancestors. And she knows that they are wrong. A day will come when all this struggle will be nothing but a distant memory.

One day all the long years of Exile will be nothing but a history lesson that quarian parents will teach their children. They will tell their children the story of how their ancestors almost destroyed themselves, only to defy the odds and reclaim their rightful place at the centre of galactic civilization.

Those who listen to the story will have no doubt as to who its heroes and villains were. They will have little sympathy for those who let themselves be ruled by fear instead of fighting to rebuild. Little sympathy for the traitors who advocated surrendering Rannoch to the geth, or for the cowards who flinched at the thought of doing what needed to be done.

Nor will they have much positive to say about hot-headed fools who would have wasted precious resources in pointless conflict with other organic life. The arrogance of the turians may be overwhelming, and the raids of batarian pirates may be irritating, but neither of them are the real problem.

That idiot Han'Gerrel is almost as bad as Zaal'Koris, she sometimes thinks, for all that he can usually be prevailed upon to vote the correct way. Both men are ruled by fear. Both of them are afraid of the geth; they just manifest their fears in different ways, one blustering while the other cowers. And the new Admiral from the Patrol Fleet, whose name she hasn't bothered to learn yet, is already proving herself a disappointment. Or at least, a disappointment to Rael'Zorah - Daro had known from the start that she didn't have the strength required for the job

No, Rael is the only other Admiral she can (grudgingly) respect. The only other person who might have the courage to do what is necessary.

The truth is that the geth are not monsters. They are machines. Tools. And a machine that malfunctions, that acts unexpectedly, isn't an enemy. It doesn't bear its former owner any ill-will. It just needs to be fixed, and then put back to work.

Once the formality of this month's Board meeting is over, and the other Admirals have departed her ship, she is free to spend her next few hours doing something useful.

Two more applicants to join the crew of the _Moreh_ this week. Both have spent their Pilgrimages on human colonies: one even visiting Arcturus station itself. Both have brought back interesting gifts: detailed schematics of a new line of security mechs; working papers on the Systems Alliance's proposed new VI training protocols. Both would be useful assets to her ship. And yet ...

She reads the reports on their gifts again, with a more critical eye.

If she only could have spent her own Pilgrimage on Earth, she sometimes thinks, or one of the other human worlds. How much she could have learned. A pity that when she was a child the humans were still so new to the galaxy. She hadn't understand then the potential that they had. None of them had.

Even in her lifetime, the humans have changed the galaxy, and they are changing it still. She hears rumours from the Citadel that the Council are on the verge of appointing the first human Spectre; rumours from the Petra Nebula of secret Alliance experiments into illegal AI technologies. Who knows what the future holds for the young species? With luck, she thinks, the humans could be powerful allies when the quarian people return to their rightful place in the galaxy.

One of the two applicants work shows real promise, she decides. He'll do. The other applicant's work is less good. His arguments are superficial, sloppy; his coding is inelegant, his summary of the VI protocols skips over details which he either doesn't understand or wrongly assumes to be trivial. One of her assistants will have a word with his birth ship; persuade him to offer his pilgrimage gift elsewhere. There's no room for imperfection among her crew.

The _Moreh_ doesn't receive many applicants, compared to some of the bigger ships, but they can afford - they _need_ \- to be selective. To only accept the best.

After all, they have a world to win.

* * *

Day 78,229 of Exile / Trebin / Tali'Zorah

There's no sign of any struggle. Which doesn't seem right at all.

When Shepard had briefed them about the latest mission, Tali had assumed that the observation camp must have been hit by raiders or pirates. The whole cluster seemed to be swarming with them these days: whether hardened criminals trying to exploit the chaos of the geth incursions, desperate former mercenary bands fallen on hard times, or even state-backed privateers, covertly funded and armed by the batarian Hegemony or other powers of the Traverse. It seemed all too easy to imagine what fate had befallen the survey team that ExoGeni had sent to Trebin.

But if that had happened, wouldn't there be evidence of a fight? Damage to the prefabs that the survey team had lived in, maybe, or signs of heavy vehicles tearing up the ground? Wouldn't the attackers have taken something with them, other than the people? But there's nothing: no sign of anything missing, no sign of any violence.

Instead it's as though everybody working in the camp just vanished, quietly leaving without a trace.

"So …" Liara voices the question they're all thinking. "Where did everybody go?"

Shepard is already walking in the direction of the largest prefab; a large ugly block of steel and concrete, branded with the ExoGeni corporate logo.

"We'll search the area," she says. "See if there's any clue as to what happened."

Tali finds herself tagging along in the rear with Liara. It's the first time she's been planetside with the asari since the archaeologist first came aboard the _Normandy_. They've spoken a few times since, of course, but not frequently. Just idle conversation at the mess hall, or polite small talk in the elevator.

Liara spends most of her time on the upper decks, in the med-bay or the crew quarters; Tali still spends most of hers down in engineering. So it's not as if she's been avoiding Liara as such, she tells herself. She hasn't needed to. The truth is that, apart from their shared mission, she doesn't think they have that much in common.

The asari is over a hundred years old; has lived on dozens of worlds, visited hundreds more. Less than a year ago, Tali had never been off the Fleet. Talking to Liara, Tali can't help but feel uneducated and small. Like a child. Like somebody who doesn't belong here.

Honestly, she isn't sure why Shepard brought either of them along this time, instead of one of the humans, or Vakarian. She doesn't know much about humans; hasn't ever had to investigate a crime scene before. She isn't sure Liara knows why she's here, either; what makes Shepard think her expertise could be useful. This base has only been abandoned for weeks, not for millennia.

"What exactly were the people doing here?" the asari asks her as they walk. Her voice is softer than Tali expects; making her sound younger than the century and more that she truly is.

"The humans intentionally crashed a comment into this planet a few months ago," Tali starts to explain, pleased that she can actually answer this one.

She'd been talking about this with some of the engineering crew, after they'd changed course for the planet. It had sounded - still sounds - an almost impossibly grandiose project, to her. But the humans had all seemed to think of it as something almost mundane; just another engineering marvel that they'd read about, discuss briefly, then never think of again.

Despite its favourable location, just half again as far from the star Antaeus as Rannoch is from the sun, Trebin is incapable of supporting organic life. There's not enough oxygen in the air, not enough liquid water. But while other species have simply written the world off as a colony prospect, the humans have decided instead to fix those issues.

One team in the far reaches of the system were tasked with scouting likely looking comets, fitting them with rockets and propulsion equipment and aiming them towards Trebin. The other team, one the planet itself, were here to survey the results of the impacts.

By bombarding Trebin with a series of comets, the humans hope to trigger a fundamental transition in the world's atmosphere. To seed the world with breathable air and drinkable water; turning a dead world into somewhere where their grandchildren can live and breathe. _Terraforming_ , they call it; reshaping the world into another Earth. It's one of the many words they use that her translators struggle with; a concept the quarians have never thought to describe. There will only ever be one Rannoch.

She isn't sure whether she should be impressed at the ambition or appalled at the arrogance. A hundred years ago, the humans hadn't even known anything about mass effect fields or element zero. There's not a human on the _Normandy_ whose grandparents hadn't grown up thinking their species was alone in the galaxy. Yet in less than two generations their grandchildren have acquired the power to refashion whole planets, and to fly ships more advanced than anything Tali has ever seen before. They're rapidly becoming one of the most powerful species in all Citadel space.

But don't the humans already have worlds enough as it is?

She runs through the technical details for Liara briefly. The asari nods as she speaks, showing more interest than Tali would have guessed, asking a couple of thoughtful questions. If she feels the same ambivalence about the project as Tali does herself, she doesn't show it.

"It is a pity that we won't be visiting Ploba." Liara says wistfully, when Tali is finished. "I have always wanted to observe the Deep Anomalies for myself."

"The Deep Anomalies?" Tali asks, curiously. She's never heard anything about this system before today. "What are they?"

"Ploba is one of the gas giants in this system," Liara explains. "Centuries ago, passing ships detected strange readings within its atmosphere. Evidence of what appear to be artificial constructions, deep below the surface layer. Features that do not appear to be natural: Buildings, perhaps, or machines. Some people believe that Ploba may long ago have been transformed into a giant computer, hosting a powerful artificial intelligence. Something my people call a Tevura Mind - forgive me, but I do not believe the quarians have a similar term."

"A planet-sized AI?" Tali replies, hoping her voice sounds steadier than she feels. Just the possibility of such a theory being right is terrifying. The geth are bad enough. Maybe the humans are crashing their comets into the wrong planet, she thinks.

"Well, it is only a theory," Liara concedes, as they follow Shepard into the prefab. "Such a thing has not been found anywhere else in the galaxy. I suspect the truth is more prosaic. Still, it would be nice to investigate the matter myself, one day. To view the Anomalies with my own eyes - from a safe distance, of course."

"What do you think they are, Liara?" asks Shepard. It's the first time she's joined in the conversation. The asari brightens at the question.

"Well," she says, "I believe that the so-called Anomalies are, in truth, the remnants of … "

Something must have triggered when they stepped inside the building, because a computer terminal on the far wall is suddenly active, flooding the room with bright blue light. They all fall silent as a holographic recording begins to play.

" _March 2nd, 2183. Everything's going well so far."_

The speaker is a human woman, wearing an atmospheric suit with the ExoGeni logo. Her suit helmet faceplate is clear, unlike the polarised visors Tali's own people wear, and behind it her eyes are bright and alert. She doesn't recognise the dating system the speaker is using; something of human origin, she supposes.

" _D/2180-Y1 landed just where the simulations predicted. We stayed on site and tracked it coming down for the last few hours, before it moved over the horizon and we lost radio signal. Must have made quite the crater when it impacted."_

She must be talking about the comet, Tali thinks. So, whenever things started to go wrong, at least they know it happened after the comet strike. She isn't sure if this gives them anything else useful though.

" _Glenn and the others have been setting up and testing equipment all week. We'll be monitoring atmospheric readings for the next few months. After all that time in the lab, I'm really looking forward to finally getting out in the field."_

The hologram, leans forward, reaching for something below the screen, and the image flickers out.

"No clues there," notes Shepard. "Let's see if we can skip ahead a few entries."

She stands over the active terminals, tapping out commands until -

" _April 6th, 2183. We've run into a small problem."_

The speaker is the same human woman as before, wearing the same branded suit; its green triangle the only flash of color on the otherwise plain white surface. Even though she's spent several weeks on a human ship now, human faces are still something of a mystery to Tali. But she thinks this woman is young; younger than most of the _Normandy_ 's engineering crew, at least.

" _One of the GPS satellites has been malfunctioning. Valya thinks something on the planet might be broadcasting some kind of signal we don't know about, something that's interfering with our systems. Not a major issue, really, but Carl thinks we should investigate._ "

The next few recordings they check are just routine updates; weather reports and personnel changes. It's oddly comforting, Tali thinks, how similar it all sounds to life on the Fleet. Then ...

" _August 20th, 2183. Carl found something strange_. _Something … I don't know. Strange."_

This seems more promising. Shepard seems to agree - she steps back from the console and looks intently at the recorded image of the speaker.

" _We've still not had any luck tracking down the interference Valya detected, but we found something hidden underground, in the caves to the north. Jon says it's old. Really, really old. Older than anything we've … well, older than anything we can think of."_

Tali sees Liara's eyes widen. Maybe Ploba and its Anomalies aren't the only interesting thing in this system after all.

" _We'll have to let Company management know about this find,_ " the recording continues." _We're not set up to analyse anything like this._ "

In the recording, the woman pauses, a small frown wrinkling her face. Her expression reminds Tali of how Engineer Adams looks when he hears about an unexpected technical problem on the ship.

" _Carl wants to have a look at it a bit more before we send word though. He seems a bit possessive of his discovery. Can't really blame him, I guess: if it's as old as Jon thinks, this could be big. If it's anything like what they found on Mars back in the '40s, this could change a lot. This could change everything."_

The next entry starts playing straight away. The same speaker as before turns to face them, but this time she looks different. Eyes wide and blood-shot, face paler than in any of the previous recordings. Tali gets the impression she's hadn't slept well before recording this..

" _September … uh. September 5th. Something happened to..."_

The speaker takes a deep breath, visibility steeling herself.

" _Carl's dead."_ she says, bluntly.

" _He was out in the caves again, messing around with that stupid thing he found."_

She scowls, shakes her head slightly.

" _We all told him not to_ ," she says. _"But he wouldn't listen. He was … obsessive. Convinced that the device had some profound secrets that he was on the verge of unlocking. He must have pressed something he shouldn't have, triggered some sort of defence mechanism, or ..."_

The speaker shudders, and looks away from the recording equipment for a long moment.

" _At least he didn't damage the device itself,"_ she says, turning back to the camera. " _At least it's safe. I guess that's something."_

She seems less upset than she did when she started speaking. Not so much calmer as … distracted, somehow. Like her attention is on something else.

The recording jumps to the next entry. It takes Tali a while to realise that the speaker is the same woman as the previous entries. Her once pristine suit looks filthy; covered in dirt and dust. And her eyes, behind the faceplate, are wide and unfocused. Tali hadn't noticed before how blue they were. She doesn't give a date this time.

" _Been having trouble sleeping. The others have moved into the caves, to be closer to ... To keep it protected."_

The speaker is bleeding: a thin trickle of blood running from a long narrow wound on her forehead. She doesn't seem to notice it; either the wound or the blood dripping down her cheek.

" _I stayed here to keep watch. To keep looking for … I can't remember what for. I can't remember."_

The last few words come out in sigh, almost a low moan. The woman in the recording blinks rapidly, lifts her hands aimlessly towards her head

" _I'm so tired,"_ she sighs. _"But the darkness is full of voices. Voices singing in the dark. I have … I have to go."_

The figure in the recording staggers away from her desk, the speaker either not remembering or not caring to turn off the camera off before she left. The holo-vid keeps playing for several minutes; showing nothing but an empty lab and a background of unfamiliar stars illuminating the night sky.

Shepard shakes her head.

"Well," she says, a grim look on her face. "I guess we know where everyone went."

"Liara," she asks. "This artifact they're talking about … does it sound like anything you've heard of?"

The asari shakes her head.

"I've heard rumours of incidences like this" she says. "Legends, really. Survey teams driven mad by cursed objects; punished for meddling in the affairs of ancient civilizations beyond our understanding. I'm afraid that I've never taken them very seriously until now."'

"But if it's as old as they thought, could it be Prothean?"

"Prothean?" Liara asks. "I suppose that it must be. Or some remnant from a civilization even older. We still know so little about previous cycles. I wonder…"

She trails off, the thought unfinished. It takes them very little time to reach the cave system, once the Normandy's scans point it out. It doesn't seem special in any way; just a natural feature of the rocks themselves. If the survey team stumbled across something left over from a pre-Prothean civilization, as Liara suggested, there's no sign of the importance of the site from outside.

There's no sign of anybody inside the first tunnel they enter. No sign in the next tunnel either, or the next. They seem to be heading further underground, Tali thinks, following a rough spiralling path as they descend below the surface. Very soon they're surrounded by darkness; the light of Trebin's sun cannot reach them here. Only the lights of their suits keep them moving forwards.

Finally the tunnels open out into a series of large chambers. There's still no sign of the survey team - or of the artifact. But the caverns are full of empty crates and boxes; clear evidence that somebody has been here. Somebody who doesn't seem to want to be found.

"Get ready for trouble," Shepard whispers to Tali and Liara before striding forwards a few feet into the central chamber.

"This is Commander Shepard of the Systems Alliance," she calls out, her voice echoing loudly in the subterranean darkness. "Our ship picked up your distress signal. Is there anyone alive down here?"

For a few seconds after Shepard speaks there is only silence. Then the tunnels are full of screams.

And full of monsters: lurching figures that throw themselves unthinkingly against their defences. Hissing apparitions that clutch and claw at Liara's biotic defences, ghouls that hiss and swipe at Tali's drones.

Shepard stands in front of Tali and Liara, protecting them from the brunt of the creatures' assault. Like Tali, the human keeps a shotgun ready for creatures that get too close; but she clearly favours her biotics. She doesn't use her biotics as defensively as Liara does, Tali notes; seeming to favour long range attacks, knocking the enemy off their feet or throwing them back into the walls.

And as terrifying as they appear, the creatures seem almost insubstantial. Empty husks, barely kept moving by some strange outside force. When they hit the ground - whether knocked back by a shotgun blast or toppled by a biotic shockwave - they don't get up.

It's over as suddenly as it began. The sudden silence is almost oppressive.

"These look like the creatures the geth were turning colonists into on Eden Prime," says Shepard, staring at the bodies carefully. "But … different somehow."

She bends down to inspect what remains of their attackers more closely. Tali looks away, still feeling strangely unnerved.

This didn't feel like fighting the geth. The geth are machines, synthetics. Built to be tools; to serve and protect the quarian people. They move and fight, but they never really seem alive. However disturbing their appearance, these creatures did.

Liara also holds herself back, Tali notices. The asari seems more confident in combat than when she first joined the crew, but she's a scientist, not a soldier.

"Did these … things attack the survey team?" the asari asks, hesitantly.

"I don't think so," says Shepard grimly. She turns over one of the bodies, with a surprisingly gentle touch, and points wordlessly at the shoulders, where a fragment of clothing is still visible.

A tattered scrap of white, stained dark with blood, and a familiar green triangle.

"These things…" Shepard says. "This is the survey team. Or what's left of them."

"How horrible," Liara whispers.

Shepard lets the arm drop back to the ground. It makes an unpleasantly wet sound as it lands, then lies still.

Shepard shakes her head, turns her eyes away and mutters something under her breath.

"We should go," she says.

They destroy the entrance to the caves from orbit, later, once they're all back on the _Normandy_. It seems the safest course of action. Perhaps the humans will not be settling on Trebin after all.

* * *

Day 78,317 of Exile / the _Citadel_ / Tali'Zorah

"... _to_ _judge Hamlet by his deeds, and not his emotions_."

It feels strange to be back on the Citadel after everything that's happened. Back in the slow moving elevators, listening to the same bland news broadcasts and endlessly looping adverts. It almost feels like nothing has changed; as though Saren and his army of geth are something that has been happening in a different galaxy.

But everything has changed. She knows that she's no longer the person she was when she first arrived on the Citadel. She's seen more of the galaxy than she ever imagined she would; befriended humans, krogan, turians and asari. And the magnitude of what she's doing has never been greater - she's not just a child on her Pilgrimage now, she's a part of something vastly more important. Fighting for the future of the whole galaxy.

They're not going to be back for long. This is just a short break to let the crew stretch their legs and resupply before they head off to investigate the new lead that the Council gave them. They know what Saren is after, after Noveria, but they're no closer to finding it themselves than they've ever been.

"You must be glad to be back in civilization after spending so long in Prothean ruins, Liara," she says.

The asari is the only other person with her in the elevator; while Shepard fends off curious reporters and meets with the ambassador, Tali has promised to take Liara to view the Prothean mass relay sculpture on the Presidium.

"Not really," Liara replies, somewhat distantly, "Cities and stations were always my mother's …"

She trails off, and Tali wishes she knew what to say to console her. It's only been a few days since Liara saw her mother die, after all. That's something they have in common now, she thinks sadly.

Tali remembers crying for weeks after her mother died, when she was a child. More than she ever thought she would; at times and places she could never really explain. She'd hidden it from her father and her instructors as best as she could; worried she was letting her mother down by not concentrating properly on her studies as he'd urged her to. Self-pity wasn't productive, after all. It was a luxury that the Fleet couldn't afford; an insult to the dead when there was still work to be done. She can almost hear her father's voice admonishing her, in the back of her mind.

She doesn't think Liara would want to hear anything like that.

" _A salarian excavation team has run into an unexpected problem after unearthing …_ "

She's suddenly aware of how quiet she's become; of how quiet they've both become. The silence makes her uncomfortable.

"Did you ever run into hanar protests?" she asks. "When you were excavating Prothean sites?"

"Once or twice." Liara answers slowly. She seems to have been thinking about something else entirely.

"I rarely unearthed new sites myself," the asari explains. "Important findings of that sort are ordinarily done by larger teams, led by more senior, more respected experts."

Tali doesn't think she's imagining the slightly bitter tone in her friend's voice.

"My work involves - or, perhaps I should say, involved - cataloguing existing sites, re-examining old evidence to see if I could find anything to support or disprove my own theories about pre-Prothean civilizations."

If Liara feels smug about how her theories have recently been proven true, she doesn't show it. Tali wonders if she'd have preferred not to be right.

" _... announced that its research colony on Ferros is finally returning a profit._ "

"It sounds like Zhu's Hope is doing well," she says instead.

"That is encouraging to hear," Liara says, with a feeble attempt at a smile. "It seems strange to say, but the time we spent on Zhu's Hope was … I was happy, despite everything."

" _ExoGeni's stock rose sharply at the announcement, with investors pleased at the surprising ..._ "

The elevator doors slide open, and suddenly something clicks into place in Tali's mind; the solution to a puzzle she hadn't realised she was working on. Liara's face brightening when Shepard turned to talk to her on Trebin; Shepard's worried look back over her shoulder in the underground caverns. The pair of them heading off into the tunnels under Zhu's Hope, and the asari shooting irritated glances at Wrex when the krogan announced his plans to join them.

"So," she starts. "You and the Commander are, um."

She isn't sure how to finish the question, all of sudden. Isn't even sure if it's a question she wants to ask. _Linking suits_ doesn't seem the right euphemism. It would be easier if Liara were a quarian, she thinks.

Not easier for Liara, of course. She'd watched Fleet and Flotilla when she was a kid, of course - everybody in her age group had, whether they admitted to it or not - but she'd known all along it was just fantasy: audience pleasing wish-fulfillment with no real basis in how the galaxy truly worked. Inter-species romance wasn't something that happened to quarians. To asari, of course, but not quarians.

Liara blinks, a puzzled look on her face, as she waits for Tali to continue.

"You've gotten to know Shepard well since joining the Normandy," Tali tries. It's half a statement, half a question. She wonders if it was obvious to the others all along. Wrex probably noticed, she thinks. Vakarian probably didn't.

Liara still seems puzzled.

"Well, I did review the Commander's service history shortly after joining," she says hesitantly. "She has had an interesting career."

 _Keelah, this is embarrassing_ , Tali thinks. Maybe the whole thing is just none of her business, but they're friends, and she's happy for them both. And it would be nice to have something to talk about apart from grieving relatives and fighting the geth.

"No," she tries one last time. "I mean, the Commander cares a lot for you..."

"I believe the Commander cares for the well-being of all her crew," Liara says innocently. A bit too innocently, Tali suddenly realises.

"Liara," she says, suspiciously. "Are you ... messing with me?"

Century old biotic doctors shouldn't be allowed to laugh at you, Tali decides. It's not dignified. But despite everything, it's good to see her friend smiling again.

Maybe everything will be okay after all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So ... that was a longer gap between chapters than I was hoping for. But with any luck, I'm hoping to get the final chapter finished by the end of the month.


	6. Revenant

_After time adrift among open stars, along tides of light and through shoals of dust, I will return to where I began._

Day 76, 829 of Exile / the _Rayya_ / Rael'Zorah

The doctors won't let him hold his wife while she dies.

Some part of him he can't control hates them for it. They couldn't stop the plagues that ravaged the ship for weeks; couldn't protect her when she fell sick. They couldn't stop her organs failing one after another as the virus tore through her immune system. Yet they dare to tell him what he can do on his own ship?

He understands their reasons, of course. The infection that is killing his wife - that has already killed so many of his crew, these last few weeks - would be nothing but a trivial affair for most species, but it is deadly to his people. Even in his enviro-suit, there's a chance of the infection spreading to him if he gets too close. That's why, other than the doctors, he's the only one even allowed in the room.

And he knows that it's not the doctors' fault his wife fell sick, or that so many others in the Fleet have succumbed to the latest wave of infections. Arguably not even the fault of whichever returning traveller had the misfortune to bring it back aboard. It certainly wasn't a deliberate action on anybody's part. Just a matter of bad luck and happenstance.

Everyone on the Fleet knows to follow the proper protocols to minimize the chance of contamination. Those protocols are drilled into all quarians while they're still children; years before they might ever leave the relative safety of the Fleet. But sometimes even following the protocols isn't enough. Minimizing chances does not always reduce them to zero. Diseases and plagues are simply a curse that have afflicted the the quarian people for centuries now; as their immune systems grow ever weaker during the long years of Exile.

So, yes. He knows the doctors have done their best. But it's not enough. She's going to die.

Antu is - _was_ , a traitorous voice whispers in his mind, already drafting her obituary - the smartest woman Rael has ever known. In another life, another galaxy, if the quarians still lived in peace on Rannoch, she could have been a diplomat, strengthening ties with their turian and asari allies in Council space, or a visionary scientist, competing and collaborating with the greatest minds on Illium and Sur'Kesh. She could have been an explorer, mapping out paths through unexplored mass relays, or a merchant trader, matching wits against the volus and the elcor. She could have been whatever she had chosen to be.

In this galaxy - where the geth have occupied Rannoch for centuries, where the quarians' erstwhile allies stood aside and watched it happen, where centuries of Exile have left the quarian people weakened and vulnerable - she's lying on an operating table, lungs clogged with blood and mucus, struggling to breath through a clustering network of tubes. Still so young, and all that intelligence, all that potential counts for nothing.

 _This is what the geth have reduced us to_ , he thinks.

All he can now do is watch. Bear witness and pray to the spirits of the ancestors he long ago stopped believing in. Not for a miraculous recovery - he's not believed in miracles for some time now - but for the chance of revenge. He will see the geth suffer for what they have done to his people. For what they have done to his family.

He keeps his vision locked on his wife's face, as she struggles in and out of consciousness. But she's too weak to stay awake for long. Too tired to speak when she is awake. Not that they need to speak; not now. They said enough to each other when they could. Last words are a luxury that they don't need.

When it's over, and he's been ushered out of the room by the medical technicians, he finds himself back in the reception room where Shala and his daughter are waiting.

"Is Mother okay?" the child asks, hopefully. Shala, one arm protectively on her shoulder, looks at him without speaking. She doesn't need him to answer the question. If he's out here, she knows what the answer must be. Shala walks away to let the two of them grieve in peace.

His daughter, Tali, is all that is left of his family now. Just as he is all that is left of hers. Population controls means that he and Antu never dreamed of having another child, of course. They were lucky to have one. Neither of them ever had siblings, and both his own parents are dead.

He will never remarry. He knows this for a fact: knows Han'Gerrel will urge him to, knows that he'll ignore the other Admiral. His friend. It's just him and Tali now. Him and the daughter who he never seemed to know how to talk to.

"Is Mother-" she tries again.

 _I'm sorry, Tali_ , he thinks. There's no easy way to say this.

"She's dead."

He doesn't recognise the sound of his own voice, hoarse and harsh from disuse. He realises that it's the first thing he's said out loud in hours.

Tali flinches slightly, but tries her best not to show it. Barely old enough to be wearing her first real suit, but she already understands the importance of self-control. As the daughter of an Admiral, she knows she can't afford to be ruled by her emotions. Knows that she will always be judged to a higher standard than others of her age, because of who her father is and who his enemies are.

Well, let them judge.

She's a good quarian, he thinks proudly, just like her mother. She deserves better than the life he has been able to give her. They both did. They deserved more from the galaxy than the crumbs that the machines have left them. The geth never cross the Veil, but they are still killing his people, all the same.

"It will be okay," he lies, awkwardly, not sure who is trying to console.

It will not be okay until the geth have been eradicated and the home world is restored. He knows that now, in his bones, more so than ever. It will be not be okay until his daughter can walk freely on the surface of the home world. 

A week later, he's already started work on his new project. Self-pity isn't productive, and he has a world to reclaim.

He can mourn the dead when the war is over.

* * *

Day 78,427 of Exile / the _Neema_ / Tali'Zorah

She's still getting used to being back on the Fleet.

After all her time away, she's surprised by how crowded everything seems; so many people, pressed so tightly together in confined spaces. Nothing specific has changed from how she remembers it, but everything seems different. She'd forgotten, too, how noisy life on board the Fleet is. Almost without realising it, she'd grown used to the quiet engines of the _Normandy_ , the near silence of the human vessel's engines, the gentle friendly chatter of the small engineering team.

The constant hum and whine of the Fleet's ships is familiar and comforting, of course. It reminds her of her childhood, of growing up on the _Rayya_. It reminds her of home. But it's also, sometimes, a lot louder than she remembered.

And while she doesn't miss the quiet of the _Normandy_ \- not really, not in any way that matters - she does find herself missing the people. Shepard and Wrex, Adams and the rest of the engineering crew. It had been good to work with them, good to be a part of something greater than herself. Good to have had a clear purpose; even if that purpose had seemed almost impossible at times.

And it had been nice to be Tali'Zorah, engineer, instead of Tali'Zorah, Admiral Rael's slightly disappointing daughter.

She'd even briefly been tempted to stay on the _Normandy_ , after the battle against Sovereign.

Not forever, of course. She knew there were pilgrims who chose never to return to the Fleet, but she'd never wanted to be one of them. She'd only daydreamed about staying for a few weeks longer. They'd stopped Sovereign, they'd saved the Citadel, but there were still pockets of his geth scattered around Council space. There was still something she could do to help.

But that would have been selfish, and Father needs - her people need her here, on the Fleet. Where she belongs.

(She'd told Shepard she'd be leaving for home on the Citadel, the night after the battle. The Commander had been standing alone by the bar, watching Williams and Vakarian argue good-naturedly about sniper rifles with a faint smile on her face. Behind them, the rest of the crew were breaking up into smaller groups, starting to mingle with the larger crowds of civilians celebrating on the dance floor.

"You aren't going to join in with the dancing, Commander?" Tali had asked.

"I don't-" Shepard had started, rubbing the back of her neck with one hand. "Well, people who've seen me dance tell me I'm not very good at it."

Something about the way she admitted that had reminded Tali of herself. When you were in the spotlight, it was hard to do things you enjoyed unless you were also good at them. A child of Admiral Zorah couldn't afford to be seen to be mediocre, anymore than the first human Spectre. She doubted the Commander was looking for sympathy though.

"I wanted to thank you," she'd said instead, feeling suddenly self-conscious. "For letting me join your crew. I hope that … I hope that I've not given you reason to regret it."

"Of course not, Tali," Shepard had replied, sounding almost surprised by the suggestion. "Everything we've done: exposing Saren, destroying his base on Virmire, fighting through his geth on Ilos … we couldn't have done any of it without you."

It was nice to hear it said, even if Tali didn't quite believe it. It would have been nice to finish the conversation there, but-

"I also wanted to say goodbye," she'd forced herself to continue. "Now that we've stopped Saren, I need to … I've been away from the Fleet for a long time."

Shepard seemed to understand what she was trying to say, even if she couldn't articulate herself properly.

"It's been an honor, Tali'Zorah," she'd said firmly, clasping her by the upper arm in that strange way humans did. "I don't know exactly when we'll run into each other again, but if the _Normandy_ 's ever in the neighbourhood, let me know if you need a hand.")

She's also still getting used to being Tali'Zorah vas Neema, and not just Tali'Zorah nar Rayya. Getting used to everyone treating her just a little bit differently than they used to, like she was closer to being an equal now than she'd been when she'd set out.

Well, almost everyone.

Her father had always said that becoming recognised as an adult was important. That it meant you'd proven that you could add something to the Fleet, not merely consume its resources. And while she wasn't as young as he was when he'd completed his Pilgrimage - few quarians alive had even left for their Pilgrimage at the age Father had returned from his - she'd still hoped that when she returned with the geth data she'd been able to impress him.

She should have known better. He's still the Admiral, the same as ever, and he's still too busy to humour her childish urge to feel important.

Not that she's seen much of Father since she returned. During her Pilgrimage he'd transferred from the _Rayya_ , the liveship where she'd grown up. His new ship was the _Alerai_ , a research vessel. She'd not been invited to visit; he'd come to see her once, a few days after she returned, and they'd spoken by vid link after that.

She realises that she can't even remember what they talked about. Not about his research: he didn't seem to want to discuss that at all. She isn't sure what that would leave them.

(She'd said goodbye to Adams and the other engineers a few days after telling Shepard. They'd all been back on the _Normandy_ by then, helping to oversee repairs to fix some of the damage the ship had taken during the final fight against Sovereign.

They'd taken on new crew, as well, to replace some of the people they'd lost in the fight against Saren. Adams had been running some of the new engineering team through their paces when she'd arrived. They'd been getting ready to head out to look for pockets of resistance in the Skyllian Verge and at least one of the new techs didn't seem too happy about that.

"The Council want us to go hunting for geth?" he'd complained to the crewmate standing next to him. "Can't they persuade the quarians to clean up their own-"

He'd seen her then, out of the corner of his eye, and frozen, skin shading in the way Tali hadn't learned to recognise as _embarrassment_.

No, not just her - he'd seen somebody else behind her, as well. The Commander, coming around the ship to do her rounds as usual.

"You're not working for the Council," Shepard had snapped, somehow seeming to tower over the other human despite her shorter height. "You're working for me."

"... yes, ma'am." the tech had said, as neutrally as possible. There had been an awkward silence for a moment or two, before he tried to speak again.

"I'm sorry ma'am, I didn't think-"

"No", Shepard had said flatly, cutting him off. "You didn't.")

Her omni-tool pings softly later that night, just when she's on the edge of sleep. On the _Neema_ she shares her sleeping quarters with a dozen other people; most of them near-strangers who she still barely knows. So she tries to stay as quiet as she can when she answers.

It's Vakarian, calling from the Citadel. She wasn't expecting to hear from him today. She's still a bit surprised they've kept in touch at all. He certainly wasn't the member of the _Normandy_ 's crew she'd expected to keep up any correspondence with. Honestly, she hadn't expected to do that with anybody, after she was back on the Fleet. It was … nice.

(Vakarian had learned that she was leaving only a few hours after Shepard did. Tali hadn't told him herself, but it seemed that word was spreading. She'd been staring at a turian brandy somebody had handed her, wondering if there was anyway she could actually drink it without removing her suit, when he'd wandered over to her to wish her farewell.

"I just wanted to say, ah."

 _Ancestors_ , she'd thought, _If he calls me a credit to my species I'm going to pour this all over him_.

"I said some stupid things earlier, when we first met," he'd said instead. "Things that - well, things I regret. I just wanted to say I was sorry. You deserved better."

Well, she hadn't been expecting that.

"Have you been talking to Wrex?" she'd asked, almost without thinking.

"... no?" Vakarian had said, clearly confused by the question. She didn't try to explain.

"Anyway," he'd continued after a pause, "I hear that you're heading back to the Fleet soon, and I was wondering if you'd like to stay in touch. There aren't many people in the galaxy who can say they've fought a Reaper, after all. Feels like those of who can should stick together."

"I'd like that," she'd said cautiously.

"Good," he'd said, sounding strangely relieved. "Me too.")

"Tali."

Something about Vakarian sounds off, she thinks. Her suit translators can't pick up all the subharmonics, can't read his emotions the way that another turian could. But he seems distressed; like he's been shaken by something important.

"I'm afraid I have some bad news," he starts, awkwardly.

Her first thought is that something must have gone wrong with his Spectre application. But it's only been a few days since he officially applied, she thinks. Surely not long enough for him to have been rejected, even if the Council ignores Shepard's recommendation. And why would they do that?

It must be some family problem, then, she decides. Some problem with the sister he so rarely speaks about, perhaps. Or something related to his work with C-Sec. Or-

"Anderson told me half an hour ago," the turian says. "But it's going to be all over the extranet in a few hours. I thought you'd want … I thought you deserved to hear before then."

 _What's going to be on the extranet?_ she thinks. _What trouble did you get into now?_

"The _Normandy_ was patrolling out in the Traverse. They were attacked by a geth ship. That's the official word, anyway."

Tali can feel her stomach lurch; see her suit begin to flash warning messages about her blood pressure and heart rate. Adams, the rest of the engineering crew. _Are they okay?_

"Most of the crew - Liara, Williams, Joker - they made it off the ship. Alliance picked up their escape pods. But the Commander…"

_No._

"I'm sorry, Tali," he says. "There's no easy way to say this. She's dead."

No, that doesn't make sense. Shepard can't be dead. Not Shepard, not her. She survived assassination attempts and direct exposure to Prothean relics. She survived fights with krogan battlemasters, with hordes of geth and with Saren himself. She wouldn't just die.

Tali could have been on that ship. Would have been on it, if Shepard hadn't chosen to prioritise collecting the geth data she needed for her Pilgrimage. (If she hadn't persuaded herself that running back to the Fleet was more important than fighting the Reapers.)

If she'd been on board, would the ship have survived? Would Shepard still be alive?

Is this her fault?

"I should have been there." she says. It's the first time she's spoken since Vakarian called. She can barely recognise the sound of her own voice.

On the vid-screen, Vakarian seems to flinch slightly.

"Tali," he says, awkwardly. "You mustn't blame your-"

"She- they needed us," she says, raising her voice over his. "Both of us. We both should have been there."

 _Shepard would have been there for us_ , she thinks. _She would have been there for you_. She doesn't quite say it out loud, but from the look in Vakarian's eyes, she doesn't think she needs to.

She doesn't remember the rest of the conversation. She does remember crying a lot, after it's over. Her bunk mates must notice, but she realises she doesn't care.

When she tries calling Vakarian to apologise a few days later, he doesn't pick up. He doesn't respond to any of her follow-up messages either.

* * *

Day 78,809 of Exile / Freedom's Progress / Tali'Zorah

She really can't understand how Prazza made it through his Pilgrimage in one piece.

It's not considered polite to ask somebody you aren't close to about their Pilgrimage, not unless they freely choose to reveal it. Not everybody gets to visit the parts of the galaxy they'd like to, after all, and the Pilgrimages are supposed to enrich the Fleet, not create divisions within it. And she and Prazza definitely aren't close.

But Prazza's enough of an idiot that she'd really like to find out. What part of the galaxy did he end up in that made him behave the way he does? She can't help but think that the captain of whichever ship he ended up on had him assigned to this mission just to be rid of him.

Her father would have done that, she thinks. Taken advantage of what he would have seen as somebody else's wasteful, speculative project and used it as a means of trimming away the less useful parts of his crew.

She hopes that's not why she was assigned to the mission herself. This is the first time she's been trusted to leave the Fleet since her Pilgrimage; leading a squad of her own onto a world overrun by the geth. She doesn't want to think that it's just a waste of time, that what they've been sent to do doesn't matter.

Their mission - the real mission, not this detour - is to investigate strange dark energy readings around Dholen. It's going to be dangerous: Dholen is deep within what used to be quarian space, which means the whole system is crawling with geth. To get close enough to the star to take accurate readings, they're going to have to make planetfall on the old quarian colony of Haelstrom. Doing that without drawing geth attention isn't going to be easy. If they're not lucky - if she makes mistakes - people will die. So she has to believe that the mission is worth the risk.

She wishes that Kal were here. It's just bad luck that he isn't; they were both en route to Haelstrom when they picked up the message that Veetor was in trouble. But the marine wasn't travelling on the same ship as her, unfortunately.

And Prazza was. Also unfortunately.

"Scanners picked up a human shuttle in orbit," he says now, as if she can't read the screens herself. "Could be trouble."

He sounds more excited by the prospect of trouble than he should, she thinks.

"This is a human colony, Prazza." she points out. "Did you really think the Alliance wouldn't send anybody to investigate?"

"We're not in Alliance space," he replies. "The Alliance just left these people to fend for themselves out here."

The tone of Prazza's voice manages to simultaneously suggest that the Alliance are monsters for abandoning their own people, and that "these people" probably did something to deserve it.

"We don't have any reason to get involved with them," she says, trying to sound as definitive as she can. "Whoever they are. We're just here for Veetor."

She really doesn't want to discuss this further.

"Veetor'Nara should never have come here," Prazza complains. "Humans can't be trusted. Remember the _Idenna_. Remember-"

"I know humans," she says, as patiently as she can manage after days of enduring this. "They're not all like Cerberus."

They're not all like the crew of the _Normandy_ either, she reminds herself. They're all different. They can be driven by greed and deceit, like the thugs who'd tried to betray her to Saren when she first arrived on the Citadel trying to seek out the Shadow Broker. They can be ambitious and reckless, like the scientists working for the ExoGeni survey team on Trebin. And they can be brave and resourceful like the colonists of Zhu's Hope - fighting against hordes ofth geth despite impossible odds, struggling to build a home for themselves far from any other of their kind.

Because they're just people, just like the millions of people living on the Fleet. Just like the turians and the asari and the krogan. She feels a bit sorry for Prazza, suddenly; of all the things she learned on her Pilgrimage it's that realisation which she thinks she values the most. For all the symbolic gifts returning Pilgrims bring with them, the most important thing they bring back to the Fleet is the knowledge that they aren't as different from the rest of the galaxy as the Exile can sometimes make it seem.

"Ah, yes," Prazza grumbles. "I forgot I was talking to a human expert. I'll let you handle them then."

 _I'm in charge of this mission, Prazza_ , she thinks, tiredly. _I don't need your approval._

It's an improvement though, or as much of one as she expects to see. Tali shakes her head, trying to ignore her irritation with Prazza, and forces herself to concentrate.

Freedom's Progress actually reminds her of Zhu's Hope, a little bit. It's a small colony, by human standards: far from the protection of the Alliance and barely large enough to be self-sufficient. She can understand what drew Veetor here; she's never met him herself, but she read his profile after their new orders came in. The Pilgrimage can be a daunting experience, even for the bravest of young quarians, thrusting them into strange new worlds beyond their experience and understanding.

And Veetor was - _is_ , she reminds herself _, is_ \- always quiet and cautious, even as a child. No surprise, then, that he would have wanted to avoid too much of a dramatic departure from the comfortable surroundings of his childhood.

Some people just have the worst luck.

Extracting Veetor isn't going to be straightforward, even without the possible complication of the new arrivals. Tali doesn't know what happened to the people here, but it's obvious that something did. They've all vanished; just like the survey team on Trebin. But Veetor is still here: injured, scared and likely suffering from CO2 poisoning. The young pilgrim is hiding out on the other side of the colony; surrounded by a small army of reprogrammed security mechs.

Getting safely around those mechs safely isn't going to be easy. If they had the numbers, they could split up; send a small team through the colony to draw out the drones while a second group headed straight for Veetor's location. That's what she'd like to do, anyway.

But there are only a handful of them: less than half the team that was being sent to Haelstrom. Not enough for that approach to work. So they're going to have to improvise.

She gets Eijuo, one of the other marines who came with Prazza, to run her through the plan again. It's a question of timing and risk management, really. Easier to think about when viewed as an academic exercise, or an engineering problem. If they've managed to map all the mechs' movement patterns properly; if the colonists didn't have access to any heavy mechs that their scans haven't been able to account for; if everyone - _even Prazza_ \- manages to be where they're supposed to be, then maybe they have a chance.

If she gets things wrong, people are going to die.

They're all so distracted that they completely forget about the human shuttle until the double doors behind them chime open. Prazza - _who else?_ \- immediately grabs for his weapon.

"Prazza!" she snaps, forcing the weapon down and glaring at her subordinate in disgust. "You said you'd let me handle this."

She turns to face the new arrivals and … oh.

_Oh._

"... Shepard?"


End file.
